Dear [Under-Capitalized Business-Guy who wants me to work on your site for 'equity'],

Thanks for taking time to meet today. It was interesting to learn about what you’re doing.

I’ve put some thought to what you’re trying to do and I have to be honest, I have some reservations about it. The business model itself may work, though I don’t know that much about the kinds of businesses you’re hoping to get as customers. But the very rough proforma you’ve put together gave me a bit of pause.

I appreciated that you’ve had the foresight to put together some financial modeling — that was reassuring. But it concerns me that you felt you could somehow spend only $50,000 on developer salaries over a 5 year period. And while I understand that at this point the numbers are all pretty rough, it just seems way low for what you’re trying to do.

A single developer (one with the skills to handle all aspects of the site, build it and keep it running, backed up and responsive as your customer base grows) would cost a very minimum of $75-80K/year (plus benefits, etc.) For $10,000/year you might be able to hire a single person at far less than half-time. That’s to me just so unrealistic as to be almost impossible. I can’t imagine it. You can’t build a software-based company without software developers. To realistically handle what you’re trying to do would likely require an ongoing staff of 2 or more people once you got to 2-300 or more customers using the application.

And if you can’t find someone willing to work for free I’d recommend a budget of closer to $50K to have enough to get things live with a decent design and cushion for when things go wrong — which they will.

But given your current funding level you probably can’t afford that. So what I’d recommend is finding a ‘technical co-founder’ that you can partner with. The only appropriate thing to do, though, would be to be up front that you don’t have money and are looking for a co-founder — and provide co-founder-level equity participation for their efforts (meaning probably no less than 30% ownership). Otherwise you won’t likely find someone with the level of skill and experience to make this thing work. You have sales experience and the idea, and that’s worth a lot.

But either way, given your current unrealistic expectations regarding cost I don’t think I can in good conscience refer you to contacts of mine as a potential partner. I wouldn’t feel right about it.

Maybe we can get together in a couple weeks and talk about where you are. I’m happy to meet and provide what guidance I can over coffee periodically.

Best of luck,
Kevin

Well, that never happened. Instead I went to college and spent more time in the computer center than I did at parties. The only thing I cranked out was code. Later, I got a job writing software and I’ve been working with computers ever since.

While I still listen to a lot of music and have Gigs of tunes on my iPod, my dreams of being a rock star have faded. I still think about them once in a while, but more than that, I now think about open source. So do a bunch of my friends – we talk about it all the time.

I met a guy at the Softpro computer book store off Route 128 in Burlington, MA, a while ago. (I hang out there now instead of the record shop.) He writes financial applications for a mutual fund company in Boston. All he wanted to talk about was JBoss. He’d spent some time working on the JMS implementation but had gotten too busy to continue. He wanted to get back involved as soon as he could. All those people who were building the latest JBoss – he wanted to be one of them.

In his eyes I saw the same stars I used to have. I used to think that way about Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. I wanted to be one of them. When I was younger, I ran out to buy the latest Led Zeppelin album – now I run out to get the latest build of Gentoo or Hula.

Open source developers are the rock stars of the software world. The parallels actually go pretty far. You can say they don’t get the money and fame, but I think you’re wrong. The average open source developer probably makes more at his or her job than most local musicians make. I’ve met open source developers who have founded software companies and are doing pretty well financially. As far as fame goes, they may not do quite as well as real rock stars but some do pretty well; Linus Torvalds is fairly famous, but I guess not like Kurt Cobain.

They’re also usually the most talented developers. Rock stars get where they are in the music world by being great musicians; open source rock stars get where they are by writing great code.

Naming their projects is a lot like naming their bands. When you hear people talking about Subversion, Ethereal, or Excalibur (all open source projects), it’s hard to tell if they mean software projects or rock bands.

A good friend of mine called me once and went on for 30 minutes about how he was submitting a patch to the Jakarta Struts project (a JSP framework from the Apache Software Foundation). His patch would allow you to define validations for one input field based on the value of some other field (e.g., if you fill in a last name, make sure you fill out a first name…). He was totally excited about it and went into all the details of how he built it.

After he was done telling me about it, he was almost out of breath. I reached in my pocket, pulled out a lighter, and stood there holding it lit in the air.

Leave it all on the stage.

I really loved this blog post. It hits the nail on the head for a lot of reasons. The writing style is good and catchy. The content is real and valuable. It’s worth checking out if you’re looking to develop income at any level for your business.

One of the answers, though, I think got it all wrong:

“Selling the engineer on the vision is key, but it doesn’t need to be the same part of the vision that you think is exciting. You may have to frame it differently in terms the engineer will understand as valuable to their learning and reputation as an engineer.

Want to eliminate third world debt through micro-finance? Ok…that’s great but might not excite an engineer. It involves implementing a machine learning algorithm to arbitrage risks based on someone’s social graph? That might be a wee bit more exciting for an engineer to implement.

Finally, just get them to help you with a very small part of the problem. If you can get them to write a few lines of code, odds are a good engineer will not be personally satisfied until it is a 1000 line elegant solution. At that point, they have sold themselves on the project.”

I have to be honest, I’m not sure I agree with this approach. It may work to sell some engineers, but not the engineer that can bring your vision to reality.

‘frame it differently in terms the engineer will understand as valuable to their learning and reputation as an engineer.’ – this is just not accurate. An engineer capable of bringing your vision to reality needs to clearly see *your* vision and buy into it. If you get them excited about a technical solution that they think will make them more valuable, what happens when the technical solution needs to change? Are they still bought in?

You and the technical founder need to be aligned on what the vision and the value are. And a good engineer for that stage in a business’ life is one that can see your vision and also see the way to make it real.

And this sentence to be honest is a bit insulting and niave – ” If you can get them to write a few lines of code, odds are a good engineer will not be personally satisfied until it is a 1000 line, elegant solution.”

A good engineer is satisfied when the solution fits the problem, not when they have a 1000 line elegant solution. Engineers that ‘over engineer’ in the name of finding elegant solutions will kill your startup.

It’s better to enlist them as a full partner with the whole team focusing appropriate levels of resources to achieve a clear business end. Great engineers are those who can do that. And they exist.

The challenge is that thinking 3 steps ahead too often will get you into trouble as you can lose site of the things you need to execute on today.

I’ve always said the hardest thing in business (especially in a startup) is to ‘execute effectively today while also building tomorrow’. Most people have it in their nature to do one or the other.

To be really successful, you need to do both. At the same time.

It addresses how to let go of things that can end up causing lots of wasted time and energy in our lives. It’s another practical, wonderful post.

“Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.” ~Dalai Lama

via Letting Go of Attachment, from A to Zen | Zen Habits.